EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Are separate classrooms inherently unequal? The effect of within-school sorting on the socioeconomic test score gap in Hungary

Zoltán Hermann, Hedvig Horváth and Dorottya Kisfalusi

Economics of Education Review, 2024, vol. 103, issue C

Abstract: This study investigates whether within-school sorting increases socioeconomic test score inequalities. Using universal test score data on 6th- and 8th-grade students in Hungary, we document the extent of within-school sorting in an institutional context where sorting based on ability or prior achievement is rare. We identify sorting schools as schools that systematically assign students with low and high socioeconomic status into different classrooms within the school. Then, exploiting school fixed effects and quasi-exogenous variation in sorting induced by enrollment and class size rules, we show that sorting has a significant and economically meaningful effect on test score inequalities between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Sorting harms low-status students, while high-status students gain much less, if anything, from attending sorting schools. We attribute our findings to the within-school reallocation of educational resources and differences in educational practices.

Keywords: Achievement gap; Inequalities; Non-merit-based sorting; Segregation; Within-school sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775724000761
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000761

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2024.102582

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-25
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:103:y:2024:i:c:s0272775724000761